Most of the sungrazing comets observed by LASCO at SOHO belong to the Kreutz group of comets and follow trajectories that are tightly clumped in space .
Statistical analysis of 9 years of SOHO observations suggests that the true apparition rate of these comets is as high as one every other day .
Practically all these comets break up before perihelion passage .
Their material is dissociated and ionized , and subsequently transported away from the Sun as pickup ions in the solar wind .
Their mean mass flux is about 3.1 \cdot 10 ^ { 4 } g \cdot s ^ { -1 } .
Since the breakup occurs between 40 and 4 solar radii and the ionization is almost immediate , the expected location of these ions in the phase space is close to the location of the inner source of pickup ions .
Assuming radial propagation , the cometary pickups should be observable at Earth between August and January , with peak probability at the end of September .
At Ulysses , they should be observable approximately between - 25 and 40 degrees ecliptic latitude during the fast latitude scans , the first of which occurred in 1995 and the second in 2001 .
The population of cometary pickup ions should be augmented by about 40 % by solar wind protons as a result of charge exchange with the cometary neutral hydrogen and oxygen atoms and subsequent reionization of the newly-created Energetic Neutral Atoms , streaming with respect to the solar wind .
In total , the average flux of the pickup ions related to the sungrazing comets at 1 AU should be about 1.6 \cdot 10 ^ { 5 } g \cdot s ^ { -1 } \cdot sr ^ { -1 } within the detection area ( and null outside it ) .
This value is comparable to the flux of the inner source-pickup ions .